The Other Side of Reckless Youth, Part 2

V. The Places You’ll Go

Meeting people had a strange compounding effect at Warren Wilson, a school of only eight hundred, that by the last day of the weekend, through various sight-seeing and other recreational activities during the night, I began to recognize people.
The tall, lanky kid with the long blonde dreadlocks. The short chipper guy with the patchy goatee. Give it time, youngblood, give it time.
There was a red-headed girl in pilgrim clothes, right down to the shoes with buckles. In an especially filthy dorm room at four o’clock in the morning, I met a twenty-six year old undergraduate who claimed to have, at age fourteen, to have trekked with a group including his parents, from Colorado to Alaska. Four months it took them, camping and hunting and stopping by grocery stores to buy sundries.
Walking from Colorado, through the Pacific-Northwest, through remote Canadian wilderness, finally arriving in Alaska. In the midst of this remarkable anecdote, I was struck by two things in particular: the first being how exceedingly normal this fellow appeared,= buzz-cut hair, stocky, circles under the eyes, black t-shirt and jeans, an average looking fellow whose outward appearance spoke nothing of a seasoned expeditioner or a product of alternative parenting. The second thing was being how much I believed him, the sincerity of his eyes, the assuredness of his voice.
When I was fourteen I felt adventurous jogging around my suburban neighborhood, discovering new and exciting cul-de-sacs.

VI. A Microcosm
Such a strange place was not without its real world references. However, I attended a party on a Saturday night at a row of campus apartment buildings that were known as the frat neighborhood.Not that there was an actual frat or greek society with any sort of adolescent-narrative comeuppance to be found on campus. But there it was, all laid out in front of me. Everything you could expect from a State-School party in Earth Liberation Front property.
There was a guy overcharging for keg beer, protecting it at the obvious cost of enjoying himself, and confronting people who had brought their own cups with them.
There was a band — I forget the name, with a keyboardist and a drummer belted out a setlist that included a few Stevie Wonder covers, bringing the house down with “Superstition.”
I met a tall young man who had actually been recruited to play basketball at Warren Wilson, which was one of the strangest things I had heard the whole weekend.
Warren Wilson has no football team, and perhaps such a factoid remains obvious, but the idea of recruiting a basketball player to this place didn’t sit well with me. I don’t know why.
Perhaps it was because I imagined the pitch, “Hey come for the basketball, stay for the slaughtering of pigs at our student-run farm!” (Author’s Note: Although there was in fact a student run-farm with livestock, it became my understanding that all the slaughtering was done off-campus by professional slaughterers.)
Between the keg misers, the cocktail-dress-wearing party girls, the tall and burly jocks, and, of course, my hard-cider filled, awkwardly-dancing self, it struck me that collegiate conventions, allowing for some colorful variations, are basically the same wherever you go. The people themselves might be radical in the very practicality of their lifestyles, but a party is a party is a party. Wooo! Party!
To be continued...